Abstract
The 1960s witnessed a renewed interest in slave narratives and African American history and culture, and the development of an aesthetics that was politically engaged, highlighted a need for social and economic reform, and moreover was distinct and separate from white western traditions. The Black Arts movement, to use Larry Neal’s words, “propose[d] a separate symbolism, mythology, critique, and iconology.”1 This move toward a new black aesthetics, the expression of which was an art that reflected a sense of self-determination, meant that the “Black artist,” as the poet Etheridge Knight states, had to “create new forms and new values, sing new songs (or purify old ones); and along with other black authorities, he must create a new history, new symbols, myths and legends (and purify old ones by fire).”2 This concept of a need for cultural “purification” in order to achieve an unadulterated form of African American expression was also articulated by other aestheticians of the movement. Addison Gayle Jr. states that the “Black Aesthetic… is corrective—a means of helping black people out of the polluted mainstream Americanism.”3 In an essay titled “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” Hoyt Fuller seems to take this idea a step further. For Fuller the break with white culture also meant that the black artist had to disentangle himself from “those who would submit to subjection without struggle [and] deserve to be enslaved.
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Notes
Larry Neal, “The Black Arts Movement,” in Within the Circle: An Anthology of African American Literary Criticism from the Harlem Renaissance to the Present, ed. Angelyn Mitchell (London: Duke University Press, 1994), 184.
Addison Gayle Jr., “The Black Aesthetic,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y. McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 1876.
Hoyt Fuller, “Towards a Black Aesthetic,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 1813.
Maulana Karenga, “Black Art: Mute Matter Given Force and Function,” in The Norton Anthology of African American Literature, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and Nellie Y McKay (New York: Norton, 1997), 1976.
Octavia Butler, interviewed by Frances M. Beal, “Black Women and the Science Fiction Genre: Interview with Octavia Butler,” Black Scholar 17, no. 2 (April 1986): 15.
Octavia Butler, interviewed by Randall Kenan, “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 14, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 496.
See Charles H. Rowell, “An Interview with Octavia E. Butler,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American and African Arts and Letters 20, no. 1 (Winter 1997): 51.
Gayl Jones, interviewed by Rowell, “An Interview with Gayl Jones,” Callaloo: A Journal of African American Arts and Letters 5:3, no. 16 (October 1982), 32–53, 45.
Gayl Jones, interviewed by Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (New York: Continuum, 1983), 93.
Gayl Jones, interviewed by Michael Harper, “Gayl Jones: An Interview,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (London: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 352.
Gayl Jones, Liberating Voices: Oral Tradition in African American Literature (London: Harvard University Press, 1991), 199.
Ashraf H. A. Rushdy, Remembering Generations: Race and Family in Contemporary African American Fiction (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001), 4.
Gayl Jones, Corregidora (London: Camden Press, 1988), 3.
Marsha Hunt, Free (London: Penguin Books, 1993), 9–10.
Marsha Hunt, Repossessing Ernestine: The Search for a Lost Soul (London: Flamingo, 1997), 154.
Ralph Ellison, “Hidden Name and Complex Fate,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 148.
Frank Kermode, The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), 47.
Dorothy West, The Living Is Easy (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 90–91.
Joanne M. Braxton, “Ancestral Presence: The Outraged Mother Figure in Contemporary Afra-American Writing,” in Wild Women in the Whirlwind: Afra-American Culture and the Contemporary Literary Renaissance ed. Joanne M. Braxton and Andrée Nicola McLaughlin (London: Serpent’s Tail, 1990), 300–301.
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Henry Louis Gates Jr. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 175, 177.
Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (London: Virago Press, 1995), 34–35.
Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings (New York: Bantam Books, 1980), 39.
Toni Morrison, Sula (London: Picador, 1991), 30.
Alice Walker, Meridian (London: Women’s Press, 1997), 87.
Karl Marx, as quoted by Adam McKible, “‘These Are the Facts of the Darky’s History’: Thinking History and Reading Names in Four African American Texts,” African American Review 28, no. 2 (Summer 1994): 224.
Sally Robinson, Engendering the Subject: Gender and Self-Representation in Contemporary’s Women Fiction (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 151.
Amy S. Gottfried, “Angry Arts: Silence, Speech, and Song in Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” African American Review 28, no. 4 (Winter 1994): 560–61.
Janice Harris, “Gayl Jones’s Corregidora,” Frontiers: Journal of Women Studies 5, no. 3 (Fall 1980): 2.
Melvin Dixon, Ride Out the Wilderness: Geography and Identity in Afro-American Literature (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1987), 115.
Sherley A. Williams, “The Blues Roots of Contemporary Afro-American Poetry,” in Chant of Saints: A Gathering of Afro-American Literature, Art, and Scholarship (London: University of Illinois Press, 1979), 125.
Houston A. Baker Jr., Blues, Ideology, and Afro-American Literature: A Vernacular Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), 5.
Marilee Lindemann, “‘This Woman Can Cross Any Line’: Power and Authority in Contemporary Women’s Fiction,” in Engendering the Word: Feminist Essays in Psychosexual Poetics, ed. Temma F. Berg et al. (Chicago: University of minois Press, 1989), 115.
Ellison, “Richard Wright’s Blues,” in Shadow and Act (New York: Vintage Books, 1972), 78–79.
Hélène Cixous, “The Laugh of Medusa,” in New French Feminism: An Anthology, ed. Elaine Marks and Isabelle de Courtivon (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1980), 257.
Mikhail Bakhtin as quoted by Henry Louis Gates Jr., The Signifying Monkey: A Theory of African American Literary Criticism (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 2.
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© 2011 Ana Nunes
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Nunes, A. (2011). History as Birthmark. In: African American Women Writers’ Historical Fiction. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118850_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230118850_4
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